grafana

Ever get an expensive power bill and want to know what appliance was the culprit? Maybe you want to learn how much an appliance is costing you? In today’s article, I show how you can use the Zooz Z-Wave Plus Power Switch with Home Assistant, InfluxDB and Grafana to track and plot an appliance’s energy usage and cost. The result is an easy to digest Grafana dashboard you can use to track what time of day your appliances are consuming the most energy and how much it’s costing you!

I’m using Z-Wave in this article, but feel free to substitute for whatever protocol your Home Automation setup is using. As long as you can get energy measurements for an appliance into Home Assistant you should be good to go!

Grafana is a really powerful tool used throughout the tech industry to visualize time series data. It’s open source software that allows you to create visual dashboards comprised of panels so that you can view and analyze your data. People frequently use it to monitor the health of their network and connected devices but in our setting, we can visualize any data we collect via Home Assistant.

Check out my last article on setting up InfluxDB to learn about a time series database and how to set one up.